Politics and Culture

August 28, 2016

Is this perhaps ironic, in the spirit of The Young Ones' appalling Rick - the People's Poet?

I fear not. And I can think of someone else with initials JC...

Meanwhile, there's some controversy [Times, £] over Jeremy's claim that he's not rich, despite pulling in a £138,000 salary:

The Labour leader told an audience in Edinburgh he wanted to fight against the elitism which, he claimed, made it appear as if only the wealthy could enjoy so-called ‘highbrow’ culture.

He said that he had a deep affection for the work of Mahler and liked other “pretty heavy classical music” — and believed this should be available to all.

“I hate the elitism [that says] only the wealthy can go to ballet, only the wealthy can go to opera, only the wealthy can go to Glyndebourne, only the wealthy can enjoy what’s termed highbrow music,” he said.

“I don’t consider myself highbrow or wealthy, but I still enjoy some aspects of classical music. I want everybody to have that attitude and that same experience.”

The Labour leader was at pains to stress that he did not discriminate against other forms. “I do enjoy Mahler, but I recognise that there is lots of other music — brass band music,” he said.

Mr Corbyn earns a little less than £75,000 a year as an MP but is also entitled to an additional £63,000 as leader of the opposition, giving a total of almost £138,000. The average UK gross salary last year was £27,500.

After 33 years in parliament, Mr Corbyn, 67, is also in line for a final salary pension worth about £50,000 a year, and already receives a state pension of £6,000 a year. He owns a £600,000 house in London.

His remarks caused surprise. An SNP spokesman said: “People listening to Jeremy Corbyn will be very surprised to hear him declaring that his six-figure salary does not make him wealthy. This is another example of how out of touch Labour is with Scottish voters.”

I love that "brass band music". He could've picked any number of non-classical musics, but brass bands just have that requisite earnest working class pedigree, unsullied by a rapacious music industry.

What gets me, even more than the absurd hypocrisy over his wealth, is this trite man-of-the-people stuff he comes out with. Who's stopping the poor from listening to Mahler? Do you have to show your bank balance over the counter before purchasing a CD of Das Lied von der Erde? What does he plan to do about it all anyway? Subsidise Covent Garden and Glyndebourne so that tickets cost a fiver apiece? Is that really a good way to spend tax money? Maybe working people don't feel particularly deprived on not being offered cheap tickets to listen to five hours of Tristan and Isolde.

If he wants to discuss the problem and make some concrete proposals for a change, he could suggest that subsidies to opera and classical music should be increased. That wouldn't have much appeal for his supposed working class audience though. It would seem, on the contrary, to be very much a sop to the upper and middle classes. Or, on the other hand, he could propose that subsidies to all these elitist art-forms should be cut completely. That might be a populist move. But he doesn't want to be accused of being anti-culture. So he ignores the problem, and just comes out with his usual feel-good pabulum - which has always served him well in the past because till now he's never been within a million miles of power.

It's all just boilerplate, though. It doesn't mean anything apart from signalling what a great People's Champ he is.

But yes, this relentless virtue-signalling does seem to work with a surprising number of people...

After much talk over the high security risks at Thursday nights Europa League soccer match between St. Etienne and Beitar Jerusalem in France Beitar supporters arrived to the stadium to find they were not allowed to enter with Israeli flags, Israeli sports news website One reported.

The fans were then greeted with not only French flags but Palestinian flags as well, marking the second time in as many weeks that an Israeli soccer team was greeted abroad with Palestinian flags....

Security measures had been stepped up ahead of the Europa League soccer match between St. Etienne and Beitar Jerusalem in France on Thursday.

Pro-Palestinian activists have called for a rally outside of St. Etienne's City Hall, using the Israeli team's presence as an opportunity to protest Israeli policies.

There was a known a possibility that St. Etienne's "Green Angels," the French club's fan group, will make their presence felt with around 200 to 300 people at the rally.

August 27, 2016

Back in 2012 French photographer Charles Fréger published Wilder Mann, a collection of portraits of folkloric beast costumes from across Europe - pagan left-overs of a pre-Christian culture celebrating the savagery and power of the natural world. Here's a good gallery for a taste - or at his website.

From the Imperial War Museum collection - "Arthur Heelas, fairy godfather of bombed London cats, buys the food for his many friends from the cats butcher, 3rd January 1941":

"A London Bus Driver feeds cats who live in wrecked houses. When the call of "meat, meat" is heard in one of London's bombed areas, graceful shapes slink out of the shadow of condemed and deserted houses and gather round Arthur Heelas, a London Bus Driver. Bombed out himself and his daughter injured in a raid, Mr Heelas takes pity on some of the many London cats who refuse to leave their bombed homes even when their owners have evacuated to safer areas."

More on Obama's "legacy project" - getting a deal with Iran at the expense of the Syrian people. Lee Smith at the Weekly Standard:

In an interview last week for his new book The Iran Wars, Jay Solomon of the Wall Street Journal told Andrea Mitchell that Iran in 2013 had threatened to pull out of nuclear talks if the United States hit Bashar al-Assad’s forces over the Syrian dictator's use of chemical weapons. The Obama administration quickly denied this. "Not true," tweeted White House aide Ned Price.

Of course it's true. And if it weren't, Barack Obama would have a lot of explaining to do. Why else did he allow Assad to violate Obama's own "red line" with impunity? Why did he jeopardize American interests and endanger allies throughout the Middle East? Why else did he allow a refugee crisis to destabilize Europe? Why has he done nothing to stop the slaughter of nearly half a million Syrians?

Obama himself publicly acknowledged that he won't interfere with Iranian interests in Syria. In a December 2015 White House press conference, the president spoke of respecting Iranian "equities" in the Levant. That means preservation of the Assad regime, a vital Iranian interest since it serves as a supply line for Iranian weapons earmarked for Hezbollah in Lebanon. The White House was so serious about respecting this particular "equity" that it repeatedly leaked details of Israeli strikes on Iranian arms convoys. Obama wanted to show the Iranians his bona fides as a negotiating partner.

A nuclear deal with Iran has been Obama's foreign policy priority since he first sat in the Oval Office. The agreement would pave the way for a broader realignment in the Middle East—downgrading traditional American allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia and upgrading Iran—and thus allow the United States to minimize its footprint in the region. With so much at stake, including his hunger for a personal legacy, Obama didn't dare risk alienating Iran by targeting Assad.

The real deal that Obama made with the mullahs has been clear for some time now: They got to keep their client in Syria, and Obama got his "historic" achievement. So why not just spin the press and claim that laying off Assad was part of the price America paid for Obama's stunning diplomatic triumph?....

So why won't the administration just tap its "compadres" now and get the message out? Because of Omran Daqneesh. He's the 5-year-old Syrian boy whose bloodied and shell-shocked visage was splashed across the international media last week. He was pulled out of the rubble left by a Syrian or Russian bombing run, and then sat in an ambulance in a nearly catatonic state as photographers snapped his picture. Omran instantly embodied the senseless waste of a five-and-a-half-year war that has taken nearly half a million lives, including thousands of children just like Omran. "The babies are dying in Aleppo," wrote the New Yorker's Robin Wright.

Sure—they're dying. But who is responsible? Wright left that part out. Yes, the Islamic State has killed lots of people in Syria. Reports last week, however, showed that Russia has killed more civilians than ISIS, which doesn't use planes to kill. Either the Assad regime or its Russian allies are dropping bombs that kill babies so as to prop up Iran's ally, the one Obama left alone to seal his deal with Tehran.

And that's why, in this one instance, the White House has been loath to reach out to its compadres and preen about the tough real-world choices Obama made to get his nuclear deal with Iran. Because those choices were gruesome, and they undercut the image of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize recipient as a man of reason, wisdom, courage, and compassion—an image the press coauthored.

In the narrative preferred by the administration and its media compadres, Obama heroically defied a gauntlet of warmongering Republicans who were akin to the hardliners of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in their opposition to the nuclear deal. The image of a 5-year-old Syrian boy covered in the rubble left by the IRGC and its allies points to an altogether different kinship. The regime Obama accommodated is party to the slaughter of infants. The only technique the White House has at its disposal in this case is to lie and deny the facts.

No one who used a position in the press to help sell the Iran deal wants to look very closely at the consequences. But these are the facts. Obama's national security staff advised, almost unanimously, backing the anti-Assad rebels. Obama rejected their counsel. And he did so not out of a judicious desire to keep America out of another Middle East conflict but to make nice with Tehran. He supported the side waging a campaign of sectarian cleansing. The administration shared intelligence with units of the Lebanese Army controlled by Hezbollah. It forced Syrian rebel groups that the United States had trained and armed to sign documents promising they wouldn't attack Assad, the despot ordering the torture and murder of their families and friends. In this way, Obama protected the man who bombs 5-year-olds.

Leading the Labour Party has been little but a continual humiliation for Mr Corbyn. He can't even sit on a train now without inviting public mockery. The only thing that keeps him and his band going is the party's growing membership, with it recently hitting 515,000. Mr Corbyn's survival has encouraged hard-Left activists to sign up in droves, which is the ultimate point of his leadership. He isn't there to lead Labour into power, he is there to reshape the party by infusing it with more Leftie followers who can bring it more closely into line with his ideology. Then someone more electable can try to take it into Government. His henchmen like John McDonnell may drive out moderates in the course of doing this, but it's all for a greater cause.

Jeremy Corbyn has spent years banging away from the sidelines until last year's leadership election saw him invested with some responsibility. He never seriously thought he would get this far, and it shows. But he has been trying to improvise, offering a leadership which has been the political equivalent of treading water. His leadership is an empty shell - a mere stop-gap to give the Hard Left time to infililtrate Labour and drag it in their direction. His election may have exposed how vacuous and empty his ideology truly is, but the Labour Party has paid the price to find this out.

In a Deutsche Welle TV interview, Rana Ahmad, an atheist who renounced her Sunni Muslim upbringing and fled Saudi Arabia for fear of execution, talks about her previous existence, living "in a stupor", until she became aware of the world of knowledge through the internet and began to read and do research.

"How come the education systems in Islamic countries do not provide this information?... What are they afraid of?"

Well, exactly this...a woman learning to think for herself and renouncing her faith:

What's bizarre here is the woman in the niqab sitting next to Rana Ahmad. This MEMRI clip will of course have been edited, so we must presume that the veiled woman made some sort of contribution to the debate. As it is, she provides a sinister figure of censure, her presence a silent rebuke - a veiled threat, literally - to this renegade atheist who's brave enough to come out and voice her opinions: opinions which, in her home country, would have likely resulted in her death, if not from her parents then from the state. So why is she there, this grim figure of doom and retribution, all in black, with a narrow slit for her eyes? Does any interview with an apostate from Islam require a balance from a hard-liner, in case - god forbid - we might get the idea that Islam does not treat its women-folk very well. Would an interview with, say, an Iranian man who's now living as openly gay in the West require a counterbalance in the form of a cleric sitting next to him in the studio, arguing that he should be put to death?

The impression of a desperate need not to appear in any way "Islamophobic" is strengthened by the rather intense and serious young interviewer, as he quickly interjects when Ahmad is critical of her strict Islamic upbringing:

Rana Ahmad: I don't consider myself to have had the life of a normal girl, in another family. I didn't know any boys. I didn't talk to any boys. I didn't feel love. You could say that I led a life of modesty, until I started working and realized that there was another world, and that there are other creatures, called "boys," on this planet.

My family was very extremist. They teach their children the Quran from age four.

Interviewer: Quran teaching is not always tantamount to extremism. We don't want to generalize.

Rana Ahmad: But children at the age of three or four can barely speak.

Indeed. And for those who don't speak Arabic, yet whose sole education is the rote learning of a text they can't understand, there might surely be reason to offer some criticism - might there not? But we don't want to generalise, do we?

Arguably Phil Spector's magnum opus - the wall of sound at its most Wagnerian. In which one of rock'n'roll's Fifties pioneers - Ike Turner - meets up with one of black music's finest voices - Tina Turner, aka Annie Mae Bullock - all under the spell of pop music's great svengali. And it's Spector's production that wins out.

Written by Spector, Jeff Barry, and Ellie Greenwich, "River Deep – Mountain High" was among the first recordings that Ike & Tina Turner did for Phil Spector's Philles Records. Spector was well aware of Ike Turner's controlling attitude in the studio, and therefore he drafted an unusual contract: the River Deep – Mountain High album and single would be credited to "Ike & Tina Turner", but Ike was paid $20,000 to stay away from the studio, and only Tina Turner's vocals would be used on the record.

The track was recorded using Spector's "Wall of Sound" production technique, cost a then-unheard-of $22,000, and required 21 session musicians and 21 background vocalists. Due to Spector's perfectionism in the studio, he made Turner sing the song over and over for several hours until he felt he had the perfect vocal take for the song. Turner recalled, "I must have sung that 500,000 times. I was drenched with sweat. I had to take my shirt off and stand there in my bra to sing."

It was the culmination of the period of his greatest success, starting with He's A Rebel, with the Crystals in '62, and Be My Baby, with the Ronettes in '63. After this he had a break before setting off again in 1969, via his work on the Beatles' Let It Be, on the long and winding road which took him to his present location - the California State Prison in Stockton.

Live version here from 1968, with a typically powerful performance from Tina, lots of silly Sixties-style dancing, and a cool Ike sitting behind with his guitar, knowing that this really never had much to do with him, but happy to play along and collect the money.

As so often with Spector songs, the lyrics are slightly off if you stop to think about them: love just like the love you had for a rag doll when you were a litttle girl, or being faithful as a puppy when you were a little boy. Still, no one ever listened to Phil Spector songs for the lyrics. Case in point: He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss).